5

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction 7

1 SAP S/4HANA Finance—the next big thing 91.1 A little history 91.2 SAP HANA 121.3 Changes to the Finance applications 161.4 SAP Fiori 201.5 A simplified architecture for Finance 23

2 Accounting and Controlling 272.1 Introducing the universal journal 272.2 General Ledger Accounting 392.3 Asset Accounting 512.4 Cost Center Accounting, Order Accounting, and

Project Accounting 552.5 Margin Analysis 632.6 Material Ledger and Actual Costing 78

3 Planning and S/4HANA Finance 873.1 The case for a single planning model 873.2 SAP Analytics Cloud for planning 943.3 Using financial plan data in SAP S/4HANA 107

4 Migrating to SAP S/4HANA Finance 1154.1 Documenting a migration 1154.2 Preparation 1184.3 Installation 1234.4 Customizing 1244.5 Migration steps 1304.6 Activities after migration 135

5 Deploying Central Finance 1375.1 Replication approach for documents 137

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5.2 System landscape 1405.3 Group reporting 155

6 SAP Fiori 1636.1 Roles and business catalogs 1646.2 Fiori apps for My Spend 1676.3 SAP Smart Business apps 1696.4 Fiori apps for professional users 1716.5 Hierarchies in Finance 1776.6 Extensibility in SAP Fiori 1816.7 Semantic tags in Accounting 1856.8 Digitizing the finance function 187

7 Outlook 1917.1 On-premise and cloud editions 1917.2 SAP S/4HANA professional services cloud 1927.3 SAP S/4HANA Cloud for other industries 1937.4 SAP S/4HANA as the digital core 194

A The Author 198

B Index 199

C Disclaimer 203

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2 Accounting and Controlling

The German-speaking world has long since separated the Accounting modules from the Controlling modules and the move to bring the two applications into a single journal entry is one of the most significant changes with SAP S/4HANA Finance. The goal of this move is to pro-vide internal and external reporting from the same data source. If you have struggled in the past to make sense of the SAP approach, the idea of having accounts, cost centers, profit centers, and so on in a single posting string, the universal journal, will make immediate sense.

2.1 Introducing the universal journal

The universal journal (ACDOCA table) significantly changes the way trans-actional data is stored for financial reporting. It offers huge benefits in terms of the ability to harmonize internal and external reporting requirements by having both read from the same document store where the account is the unifying element for all forms of financial reporting. You will still need to understand the different applications to the extent that you need to perform different business transactions in each application. This means that you still have to create general journal entries in General Ledger Accounting, ac-quire and retire assets in Asset Accounting, run allocations and settlement in Controlling, capitalize research and development costs in Investment Management, and so on, but in reporting, you read from one source, re-gardless of whether you want to supply data to your consolidation system, report to the tax authorities, or make internal management decisions.

Figure 2.1 illustrates the way the universal journal combines reporting dimensions from the separate applications (General Ledger Accounting, Profitability Analysis, Controlling, Asset Accounting, and Material Ledger) to provide a unified data structure for reporting that includes all relevant dimensions.

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Accounting and Controlling

Figure 2.1: Combining reporting dimensions in the universal journal

We previously saw the key fields of the universal journal in Figure 1.3. If we now look at the details of the new line item table in Figure 2.2, we see how the existing fields for General Ledger Accounting, Asset Accounting, the Material Ledger, and Controlling are combined in the universal journal using a series of include structures, bringing data from the many different business transactions to deliver a single source of truth for financial report-ing in SAP S/4HANA.

The massive simplification inherent in this structure is that instead of hav-ing a separate set of revenue lines in Profitability Analysis, Profit Center Accounting, and Financial Accounting, each offering a different amount of

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Accounting and Controlling

detail about the same business transaction, you can report from a single source document in the ACDOCA table. For internal reporting, for example, you might select revenue lines for a particular product or customer (infor-mation captured as characteristics that you can choose when you generate your operating concern in Profitability Analysis) and for external reporting, you select the same revenue lines based on the profit center or company code in the document.

Figure 2.2: Merging the SAP ERP applications in the universal journal

When we talk about a single source of truth, what we mean is that instead of looking at datasets in multiple applications, we are looking at different aggregations of the same dataset by selecting fields from the various in-clude structures shown in Figure 2.2. As we discussed in Section 1.2.1, the idea of the column store is significant. We may have hundreds of company codes, thousands of profit centers, and tens of thousands of customers, but these can be queried much more efficiently than in the past when each ap-plication built its own data store to record information about these entities.

In this context, it is also worth understanding how the different applications used to aggregate their data in the past. Even though many of the relevant fields were included in the BSEG table, organizations would configure their Financial Accounting applications to remove the individual cost centers from a large payroll document using summarization, or to remove the in-dividual materials from a large invoice and only keep the cost center detail in Cost Center Accounting and the material detail in Profitability Analysis. This different granularity provided its own challenges when reconciling the various applications as key information was lost in the aggregation.

Before we look at what is new, let us remind ourselves of the high-level dif-ferences between the datasets in the various applications. However, if you

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Accounting and Controlling

are new to SAP S/4HANA Finance, you can skip straight to the next section because you do not have to worry about the historical differences between the various applications. All the Financials applications aggregate by period and fiscal year, but the other reporting dimensions are different in each application, making reconciliation tricky and meaning that management meetings are often spent discussing whose version of the truth is correct rather than what to do about the business situation the figures are showing.

2.1.1 Structure of General Ledger Accounting

Depending on which version of the SAP software you are using, you can approach a move to SAP S/4 HANA with two different options for General Ledger Accounting:

f Classic General Ledger Accounting—available from SAP R/3 on-wards, stores data by account, company code, and business area, as we saw when we looked at table GLT0 in Figure 1.2. If you need reporting dimensions other than company code and business area, you can activate additional applications for Profit Center Account-ing and Consolidation Preparation or build your own special ledger applications for Cost of Goods Sold Reporting, Segment Reporting, and so on. The separate ledgers for Profit Center Accounting, Con-solidation Preparation, and so on, are no longer required since the in-formation is in the universal journal, but these ledgers are still updat-ed and can continue to be used for an interim period. These special ledgers are considered part of the compatibility scope, which means that they will be supported for an interim period, but not beyond 2025. In addition to these ledgers, a reconciliation ledger stored the results of any allocations or settlements in Controlling that cross-ed company code boundaries and had to be reflected in General Ledger Accounting at period close by running transaction KALC to generate the appropriate journal entries. Moving to the univer-sal journal makes the reconciliation ledger and transaction KALC obsolete because there is only one document in Accounting and Controlling. Here, however, the COFIT table is no longer updated and the legacy reports offered for Cost Element Reporting are no longer supported.

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Accounting and Controlling

f SAP ERP General Ledger Accounting (formerly known as new Gen-eral Ledger Accounting) available from SAP ERP onwards enabled you to extend the basic account, company code, business area ap-proach by activating additional scenarios to support Profit Center Accounting, Cost of Goods Sold Reporting, Consolidation Prepa-ration, Segment Reporting, and so on. Activating these scenarios extends table FAGLFLEXA to store details of the profit centers and partner profit centers, functional areas and partner functional areas, trading partners and partner trading partners, segments and part-ner segments, and so on. What the scenarios enable is essentially drill-down reporting for these dimensions within the general ledger. Technically, you were creating additional aggregates for each of the scenarios that you added to the general ledger. The reconciliation ledger became obsolete if you activated real-time integration with CO so that any allocation or settlement that crosses a company code boundary (or a profit center boundary, a functional area boundary, and so on) would trigger a posting in the general ledger to reflect the change. This was progress compared to classic General Ledger Accounting, but there were limits to the number of dimensions that you could safely add to aggregate table FAGLFLEXA. With the uni-versal journal, you no longer need to activate the various reporting scenarios separately—the columns are automatically updated if you maintain the proper assignments in your master data and you can add further dimensions to the coding block and extend the op-erating concern for Profitability Analysis as required.

One of the common misconceptions about the universal journal is that it is the only table used for General Ledger Accounting. In truth, the old doc-ument header table (BKPF) and document line item table (BSEG) continue to exist alongside the universal journal, as shown in Figure 2.3. The BSEG table continues to be used for open item clearing and related tasks, but the entries can be summarized to remove entities such as the product sold or the cost centers, where the detailed information is only needed in the uni-versal journal (ACDOCA). However, since the BSEG is used for clearing, you will need to retain the material for goods receipt/invoice receipt clearing.

Index

199

B IndexAAccount assignments 42, 56Account-based Profitability Analysis

63, 128Account groups 179Accounting interface 138, 144Accounting principles 32, 47, 130Accounts 44, 186Accounts Receivable Accountant

165Accounts Receivable Manager 20Accruals 130ACDOCA 18, 19, 27ACDOCP 88, 90ACDOCU 156Actual Costing 37, 78Affiliated companies 188Aggregations 29Asset Accounting 32, 33, 51, 129Asset acquisition 55Assets under construction 47Auxiliary cost component split 68Availability control 92, 108

BBack-end components 170Backup tables 117Balance carryforward 134Batch processes 9BSEG 19, 31Budget 108Budget availability control 92Budget Availability Control 108Business catalogs 164Business partner 26Business transactions 27

CCentral Finance 137Central reporting layer 137Charts of depreciation 129CI_COBL 44Classic General Ledger Accounting

30Client/server architecture 9Cloud, 191Coding block 183COEP 43COFIT 30Column store 12Commitments 109Commitments by Cost Center 110Compatibility views 17Consolidated P&L by Nature 157Consolidation Monitor 162Consolidation table 156Contract Accounts Receivable and

Payable 38CO-PA accelerator 15Correction entry 118Cost and activity planning 97Cost breakdown 65Cost Center Budget Report 108Cost Element Category 45, 58Cost elements 44Costing-based Profitability Analysis

77Cost object mapping 150Cost of goods sold 63Currencies 50

DData cleansing 140Data Monitor 161

Index

200

DataSource 0FI_ACDOCA_10 137

Data warehouses 10Define Financial Statement Items

158Delivery quantity 69Deprecated transactions 122Depreciation 53Depreciation areas 54Derivation rules 63Digital core 12, 194Direct activity allocation 57Display Costs by Work Center or

Operation 112Display Group Journal Entries 159Document splitting 127, 144

EEmployee Self-Service 10Enriching actual data 132Entry view 54Extensibility 181Extension ledgers 49

FFAGLFLEXA 31FAGLFLEXP 87Financial Planning and Analysis 94Financial Statement 171Financial statement version 177Financial statement versions 177Fixed Asset 52Flexible Hierarchies 179Front-end components 170

GGeneral Ledger Accounting 30, 42General ledger data 125General ledger view 54G/L account 174G/L accounts 44

Global Accounting Hierarchy 156, 177

Granularity 29Graphical user interface 10GR/IR Monitor 189Gross Margin 72Group Reporting 155Group valuation 48

IImport Financial Plan Data 92Incoming Sales Orders 71Index tables 16Initial data load 154In-Memory Data Management 11Innovation without disruption 13Insert 14Integrated Financial Planning 95Intercompany Matching and

Reconciliation 188Intercompany reconciliation 188Internal order 140Inventory Accounting 79

KKey mapping 148

LLedger 32, 47Ledgers 127Locks 14

MMain cost component split 68Mainframes 9Manage Allocations 60Manage Cost Centers 108, 175Manage Customer Line Items 172Managed cloud 191Manage Flexible Hierarchies 179

Index

201

Manage G/L Account Master Data 174

Manage Global Accounting Hierarchy 177

Manage Journal Entries 160, 173Manage Material Valuation 37Management information systems

10Manager Self-Service 10Mapping tables 140Margin Analysis 35, 63Market segments 184Master data governance 142MATDOC 26, 80, 81Material Ledger 37, 78Material number 26Material Price Analysis 82Migration of balances 134Migration of the line items 133Migration source 116MLDOC 26MLDOCCCS 26Monitor Predictive Accounting 174Moving average price 81Multidimensional reporting 10My Spend 167

NNew Asset Accounting 32, 129New Asset Accounting 51New data structures 120New General Ledger Accounting

31Non-operating accounts 45Not assigned costs 42

OObject number 56Online analytical processing 10On premise 191Open item management 38Operating concern 35, 63Overdue Receivables 21, 166, 169

PPair mapping 149Parallel cost of goods manu-

factured 62Partner dimension 42Partner object 56Partner object number 56Periodic Valuation 68Plan categories 91Plan Cost Center Expenses 97Planning model 88Planning transactions 87Post General Journal Entry 174Predictive accounting 49, 71Price Determination 80Primary cost elements 131Primary cost posting 33Primary Costs 45Primary database 15Private cloud 191Product cost collector 140Product cost simulation 103Production Cost Analysis 112, 113Production variances 112Product Profitability 36Profitability Analysis 13, 35Profit center valuation 48Project Budget Report 110Project planning 105Project Profitability 76

RReal-time derivation 74Receiver 57Reconciliation account 34Reconciliation ledger 18, 30Reconciliation objects 78Remote function call 139Reorganization 65Reporting characteristics 13Roles 164Row store 12

Index

202

Rules framework 189Run Allocations 61

SSales and profitability planning 102SAP Accounting 24SAP Analytics Cloud 94SAP BPC for SAP S/4HANA 94SAP Business Suite powered by

HANA 25SAP Digital Boardroom 11SAP ERP General Ledger Account-

ing 31SAP Fiori 12, 163SAP Gateway 166SAP HANA 12SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud 191SAP Landscape Transformation

141SAP S/4HANA 25SAP S/4HANA Finance 11, 25SAP Simple Finance Add-On for

SAP Business Suite powered by HANA 25

Scenarios 31Scope items 193Secondary cost element 57Secondary cost elements 58, 131Secondary cost posting 34Secondary database 15Select statement 13Semantic tags 185Sender 57Sender-receiver relationship 57Sender-receiver relationships 58Service providers 192Side-car approach 15Simplification items 121Simplification list 122Single source of truth 29Single valuation ledgers 49Soft close 59

Sparsely filled matrix 41Special Ledger 42Splitting scheme 66Spreadsheet 11Star schema 10Statistical postings 43Statistical sales conditions 73Statistical sales conditions 74Substitutions 43Summarization 29Summarization in BSEG 19Summarization levels 14

TT-Accounts 22Target costs 112Three-tier architecture 10Timeliness 10Totals records 87Totals tables 16, 80Transfer structure 144Trial balance 39, 52

UUnified data structure 27Universal allocation 60Universal journal 18, 27, 115Update 14User interface 20

VValidations 43Value fields 35Value mapping 146Version 62View technology 170

WWeb services 10Weighted average cost 78Work in process 47, 59